If it’s really ‘all good’ in the Cloud, then why wait any longer?
Last week, I attended an “awesome” event
hosted by AWS and their Co-Sponsor Intel in the ‘Silicon Docks’ area of Dublin,
Ireland. The event appropriately named “AWSome day” was a whistle stop tour of
AWS’s complex cloud offering that ranged from Compute Services like EC2 to
Storage Services like S3, Elastic Block Storage (EBS), Dynamo DB plus others.
So after hearing AWS’s offering and some
technical details about its platform, the following points struck me about AWS
as something that one cannot overlook when thinking about how to structure
one’s digital footprint in today’s world:
Availability – AWS has a highly robust and developed global network of
availability zones, each one containing between 1 and 6 data centres, which
provides uptime availability to a target of 99.99999999% as claimed by AWS on
the day.
Reliability – In addition to the 11 availability zones that have sub zones
(multiple data centres), there are 53 edge locations where “Route 53” DNS
management and mapping takes place. Route 53 services ensure data is returned
to a user as quickly as the nearest edge location managing the routing traffic
can provide it.
Customisation
– You can select exactly what kind of processing
power you want, what kind of storage you need and what kind of access you want
in configuration of your AWS solution. This allows for higher performance to be
returned in cost effective manner given your needs are well defined.
Access
Control – The ability to set policies by instance
to regional level helps with security and business rule policies on information
management (access) are useful also.
Size – The ability to scale up and scale down with AWS is apparently
very easy and user friendly in its execution. AWS is over 10 times larger then
its entire competitor list put together and thus is the cloud titan of today!
Big
Data – AWS has big data stack providing services
and enhancements for Big Data users of Hadoop and Spark. The underlying
infrastructure in my view lends itself to parallelisation and good performance
in big data jobs
So, it would appear AWS has gotten its business
structured in a way that it could last a thousand years! Can it? Oh dude, I
don’t know but what I do know is that migration onto the cloud needs to be done
carefully and know that if you don’t do what’s right for your business, the
costs involved could be enormous! Do it carefully, then the savings and gains
will outmatch the risk you take so why not take some pre migration steps like
these:
Risk
Matrix – Create a list of elements involved in your
IT structure both positive, negative and neutral and rank them by risk
propensity (likelihood of it happening) to risk impact (direct impact of it
happening on your business). Map them
out by these two elements in a cluster chart and see where they all sit, then
group them by common thread see what risk picture your current IT structure &
cloud solution presents.
Cost – Cloud provider pricing has a free tier these days, but when you
exceed it, the pricing structures kick in and can become complex especially if
you are using allot of services that present a value adding solution for your
company. AWS is no different in this regard! Understand your proposition in terms
of current state and costs along with project incurred state and costs. Not
understanding your cost obligations may cost you dearly e.g. if you have a ‘freemium’ business model offering highly
popular services such as SaaS over the web, footing the cloud bill based on
throughput may come as a real shocker so be careful!
Purchase
Choice – A strange thing about the cloud is that it
appears they all offer the same service but they don’t. They may have
comparable storage and compute services, but there are differentiation in many
services and levels that should not be overlooked or assumed. For example, AWS
has a neat service for using access keys call KMS (Key Management Service), Microsoft
azure has Key Vault which can also simplify access key management. They work a
little differently as the options for access management can vary, so it’s worth
getting to know your preferred option in great detail.
A Cloud partner is a key business partner
choice so investing in the selection of a cloud partner is a must to mitigate
the risk a cloud partner can bring such as:
Financial
insecurity – if your cloud partner is financially
distressed and becomes insolvent, your stored data and services on the cloud
are at risk of being lost or breached due to lack of maintenance by the
provider.
Poor
controls – some vendors have being found out for
their poor controls where staff has used their work passwords on personal
computers that were breached by hackers who then attacked the cloud platform
successfully. A poorly managed Cloud provider with poor internal controls is a
threat to your business!
Billing
– the nature of cloud platform billing often sees
careful customers run low bills. Budgets are based often on time constrained
accountants who use last years spending patterns to set budgets. Be aware of
your traffic and all triggers used in cloud billing like storage, V/M use, DB
instance use, etc. The resulting shock in bills for successful business
campaign could financially distress your company especially if you bundle free
services in your offering.
Downtime – Even AWS has down time, which costs a whole lot of money for its
customers. That said; its downtime is very low compared with competitors and
in-house solutions in terms of company wide crashes.
Security – With platforms, there is a race between vendor and hacker to stop/seek
a breach! Staffers are targets for access codes, the platform is a target for
remote attacks and I’m sure there are other areas where this battle continues
between vendor and hacker!
As I headed home, I realised the AWS has
become a leader in cloud technology because they never lost sight of what the
customer needed. With a little time and investment in your business future, you
too could be on your way to the cloud joining so many successful established
and start up businesses…
What do you think? Are we putting our heads
into the cloud and seeing more clearly or are we for the birds?? Leave a
comment with your opinion...
Sources/Credits:
Pics;
AWSome Day hosted by AWS bringing the
audience on a whistle tour of AWS’s cloud offering. *2 Pictures.
Credits;
AWSome Day hosted by AWS bringing the
audience on a whistle tour of AWS’s cloud offering.
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